The Cardinal is right about dangerous secularism - but it's our politicians who are to blame

I’m not one of those who believes that there is a new holy war between atheists and the Christian faith. But Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic, former Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, strikes a chord when he speaks of a new secularism that is ‘very, very dangerous’ and which threatens our great national tradition of tolerant pluralism: ‘In the name of tolerance,’ he says, ‘it seems to me that tolerance is being abolished.’

The overwhelming majority of my atheist friends are precisely in the finest tradition of tolerant inclusivity and freedom of thought and belief. Our own Dr Simon Heffer, who bestrides these pages like a colossus, is a self-declared atheist, but would no more want to sweep religion from the public sphere than would Cardinal Murphy O’Connor.

That’s because most of our sentient secularists are in the post-Enlightenment tradition of believing that the state should not distinguish between consciences; there is an equality before the law for all those of any faith and of none.

Roman Catholic Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor has spoken of 'dangerous' secularists who want to sweep religious faith under the carpet like an eccentric hobby

That is the tradition of rationalists and empiricists such as Hume, Locke and Rousseau (and, incidentally, an Enlightenment that saw no incompatibility between rationalist empiricism and religious belief). It is also the tradition of the English Church.

But there are those – and the Cardinal is right to identify them – who would wish to sweep religious faith from the public square, to consign it to the status of a private and eccentric hobby and to claim that the Christian faith, in particular, has no role in defining the character and governing institutions of this country.

Despite their protestations to the contrary, the National Secular Society and the British Humanist Association are the marshalling points for this new intolerance. Politicians such as Dr Evan Harris, the Lib Dem who thankfully lost his seat at the last election when the voters of Oxford rumbled his agenda, are among those who rally to the cause of religious proscription.

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They are aided, shockingly, by Conservatives of indolent thinking, such as Prime Minister David Cameron and his Baldrick Chancellor George Osborne. The former speaks of his Christian faith fading in and out like Chiltern FM Radio. But we weren’t to know that he meant that it was his fingers on the volume control – turning it up when he needed some support for his vague Big Society and down again when he thinks he doesn’t need it.

His enthusiasm for gay marriage is a case in point, his desire to appease Nick Clegg with a secularist bauble outweighing the unravelling of an ancient institution of the fabric of society and with no regard for the implications of the state running a separate definition of marriage from that of its established Church.

Meanwhile, Mr Osborne talks airily of abolishing Sunday trading laws for the duration of the Olympics. Again, a casual disregard for what our Christian heritage delivers to all our citizens, whether they are Christians or not.

And that’s the point. The new breed of politician-lite doesn’t seem to understand where the British traditions of tolerance and pluralism – the true defining characteristics of secularism – spring from. Cardinal Murphy O’Connor may understandably have been reticent about identifying the source of the tolerance that he sensibly seeks to champion. For that source is very substantially the Church of England, established in law in the white-hot heat of that post-reformational Enlightenment.

Head of the Church: The Queen has taken pains to highlight the importance of religion in modern-day Britain

The Queen – lest anyone forgets, the Church of England’s Supreme Governor as well as Head of State – had it absolutely right when she delivered a speech at Lambeth Palace, the London base of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in February. She spoke of the Church of England ‘gently and assuredly’ creating the environment for all faith communities and those of no faith at all to live freely: ‘Woven into the fabric of this country, the Church has helped to build a better society, more and more in active co-operation for the common good with those of other faiths.’

That is the tradition that it takes a Roman Catholic Cardinal to identify on our behalf. And it is that tradition that our Prime Minister and his Chancellor are allowing to wither on the vine through their lazy indifference and short-term political and economic expedience.